Category Archives: Network & Server Administration

I have been working on a new backup management system that utilizes the Synology and its ability to schedule tasks recently. Whilst I am untimely working on a program written in Go to be able to manage multiple backup configurations utilizing multiple backup protocols to achieve my goal I have been playing with the underlying software and protocols outside this program. One such piece of software is LFTP, this software allows for the transfer of files utilizing the FTP, FTPs, sFTP, HTTP, HTTPS and other protocols but the afore mentioned ones are the ones that are important for the software I am writing, but most importantly it supports mirroring with the FTP series protocols

Whilst I am writing this software I still wanted to get backups of the system running, to this end I was testing the LFTP commands and I hit an issue where the system will simply not connect to the server, yet the regular FTP client works fine.

Firstly we have to understand that LFTP does not connect to the server until the first command is issued, in the case of the example below, this was ls. Once this command is issued LFTP attempts to connect to and log in to the server, and this is where the issue happens, LFTP just hangs at “Logging In”

To work out what the issues I had to do a little research and it comes down the fact the LFTP wants to default to secure connections, which in and of itself is not a bad thing, in fact it is a good thing but many FTP servers are yet to implement the sFTP/FTPs protocols and as such we end up with a hang at login. There is, however, two ways to fix this.

The first way to fix this is to turn off FTP for this connection only which is done through the modified connect command of

This is best if you are dealing with predominantly secure sites, however as I said most FTP servers are still utilising the older insecure FTP protocol at which point it may be more beneficial to change the LFTP configuration to default to insecure mode (and then enable it if needed for the secure connections, depends on which you have more of). To do this we need to edit the LFTP config file, to do this do the following

I recently had a need to unzip a whole bunch of zip files at work containing new client RADIUS certificates to be installed on the clients due to the depreciation of the SHA1 algorithm for security reasons by the software vendors (Microsoft and Apple in this case).

These zip files contained one useful certificate file (a .pfx containing the required certificate and the new certificate chain) per zip and a bunch of other files that are only applicable in certain situations, that I need to remove once decompressed and extracted the files from the zip archive. I consequently used a simple multiple-step process utilizing the power of the terminal prompt/command line to achieve this.

Firstly if you are needing to do this, I am assuming the files are all easily accessible and to make it easier, let’s make a directory to house all the initial zip files and put the files in there, this makes the cleanup so much easier later.

Once this is achived we can utilise the terminal prompt to make the rest of the process easier. I recommend you do this and put the files in their own directory as the following command swquice will unzip ALL zip archives files (or rather it will attempt to unzip anything with a .zip extension) in the directory, and will delete them if you do that part of the process.

Open terminal (Type Terminal into Spotlight Command + Space Bar or it is in the Application/Utilities folder)

In terminal do the following

[code language=”bash”]# go to the containing folder

cd /Users/jpsimmonds/Downloads/AAAA-Certs

#Unzip all the Files in the directory (escape “\” is used to stop wildcard expansion)

unzip \*.zip

#Remove All Zip Files – To change the file types to remove change the “zip” portion of the command

rm -f *.zip[/code]

Nice and easy, the files are now extracted and the initial zips (and other files if you ran the delete command on extra extensions) are removed, leaving you just the files that you require

So you have downloaded Ubuntu 16.04 and noticed supports EFI, yet when you try to boot from the ISO message, you are greeted with a message stating that the machine does not detect it as an EFI capable disk, as shown below

Luckly this is an easy fix, as it is simply secure boot that Ubuntu/Hyper-V are having an argument over.

Turning off your VM, open up the settings page and navigate to the “Firmware” menu. As you can see in the first image below, “Secure Boot” is enabled (checked). To fix this, simply uncheck it as per the second image below, click “Apply” then “Ok”Upon doing this and restarting your virtual machine, you will now be presented with the boot menu from the disk, allowing you to continue on your way